Birth Certificate

Birth Certificate (1961)

Świadectwo urodzenia

Three separate stories depicting the tense everyday life during occupation, as seen through the eyes of children. In “On the Road,” the two main protagonists are lost in the September’s strife: a young boy, and a soldier transporting the valueless documents of his broken unit. In “Letter from the Concentration Camp” the story’s protagonists are young boys who help their mother during the hardships of the occupation. Their treasure is an officer uniform belonging their father who is being held in a prisoner of war camp. In “Blood Drop,” the Germans find a set of typical Aryan characteristics in this story’s protagonist – a Jewish girl, hiding in an orphanage.

Date of release
1961-10-02
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (24)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Stanisław Różewicz

Casting

Interesting facts

Birth Certificate is a Polish war film from 1961 directed by Stanisław Różewicz, based on a screenplay co-written with the director's brother, Tadeusz Różewicz. The film consists of three separate novellas, each narrated from the perspective of children affected by the events of World War II.

Production

Birth Certificate was produced by the Film Group Rytm, under the artistic direction of Jan Rybkowski and the literary supervision of Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski. The inspiration for the film's director, Stanisław Różewicz, and his brother, poet Tadeusz Różewicz, came from real-life events. The ideas for the first two novellas (Na drodze, List z obozu) were based on the personal wartime experiences of the two brothers.

The brothers brought the script to Rytm in the spring of 1960, and on June 3 of the same year, a meeting of the Script Evaluation Commission took place, chaired by Tadeusz Karpowski. The script sparked lively discussion; its artistic value was generally appreciated, but many members of the commission were opposed to starting work on the project.

A significant contribution to the film's artistic quality came from the cinematographer Stanisław Loth and the set designer Tadeusz Wybult. The music for Birth Certificate was composed by Lucjan Kaszycki, while the film was edited by Czesław Raniszewski and Anna Rubińska. The film was shot in Łódź, Spała, Piotrków Trybunalski (at the train station and with a city panorama), and by the Pilica river.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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